Metrograph

Ottinger’s wide-ranging, wanderlusty, utterly unorthodox “ethnographies” have taken her just about everywhere on the planet—the title of her great 1989 Joan of Arc of Mongolia alone should give some sense of her field of operations. And now Ottinger, a peripatetic, constantly curious, and always unexpected filmmaker—an underappreciated key figure of New German Cinema, praised by contemporary queer iconoclast R.W. Fassbinder—turns her camera, with compelling results, onto the place she called home from 1962-69: Paris. A film about a long faded Paris, and also about an imagined future Paris, the utopian metropolis that Ottinger eloquently recalls having dreamt about with friends while living on the Left Bank. Positioned at the intersection of nostalgia and self-mythologizing regret, while miraculously indulging in neither. “[An] extraordinary sort of aesthetico-political nonfiction bildungsroman, in which Ottinger fuses her self-portraiture and her reminiscences with the life of the city and the ideas of the times, as she encountered them.” —Richard Brody

Distributor: Icarus Films

Q&A with Ulrike Ottinger moderated by filmmaker Michael M. Bilandic on Friday, October 3rd